Letters | Covid in Taiwan: online classes make one teacher long for a better future
- The rapid move to e-learning means teachers have had to scramble to put together lectures suited to the new mode
All courses are now taught online in Taiwan, and I wonder if this will continue into the fall semester. What a change that would be.
I can’t speak for students, though I suspect that on the whole they pretty much like going online, especially the one big change that classes frequently end early, before the standard two-to-three hour teaching period in the classroom. That might have also made my life a bit easier, but it did not change the fact that preparing online classes took a great deal of time and effort.
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Queues at Taiwan Covid-19 testing site as the island battles surge in cases
I normally use a PowerPoint presentation shared with students to enable my teaching. To be sure, getting these PowerPoint presentations into shape took a great deal of time and energy, but actually using them in the online class was a tad simplistic, almost immobile. Although students can learn new material this way, it lacks real communicative, cooperative activity.